The Land Trap

A new history of the world's oldest asset - land - and how it determines our fortunes today.

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This is the story of the world's oldest asset and how it has sparked revolutions, fuelled huge economic booms, led to the worst financial crises in history, and still poses the greatest risks to our prosperity today.

Land is a unique resource, ungoverned by the laws of supply and demand: it cannot be produced, its supply is fixed and it does not decay.

In this sweeping and vivid history, journalist for The Economist and podcaster Mike Bird places land at the epicentre of the global economy, and contemporary business, politics, and history. The tumultuous narrative of land as an asset takes us to ancient Babylon, seventeenth-century colonial America and modern China's gargantuan property bubble. It shows how land came to hold the central role in the global banking system, as well as in the finances of ordinary households and businesses around the world.

The Land Trap reveals that our most ancient asset remains to this day the hidden factor determining economic failure and success - for individuals, companies and entire nations.